Step back with us, won’t you, to a time when your triumphs and problems were your neighbors’ business …
… when a series of rattling spins and clicks provided a dramatic prologue to every conversation …
… and when a hero to all sons of western New York was making convoluted, enigmatic introductions like this one every week on network television.
(There is a classic Blumenau family story involving Rod Serling, and perhaps someday I will tell it; but not now. There will be time enough at last.)
This week 50 years ago, we find the youth of 1107 Hope Street celebrating a victory distinctly of its time and place:
Sept. 11, 1963. Whitey Ford and Alvin Jackson cruise to complete-game wins for New York’s baseball teams, who are, respectively, in first place by 13 games and in last by 39 1/2.
Ah, yes, the days when all phones were anchored on desks or walls — and if you wanted another one, you had to have Ma Bell’s minions come put it in. My dad remembers:
I do know that AT&T was a total monopoly when I was growing up, and they owned your phone and the wiring and all, and you rented it each month. If you wanted two phones, you paid more and rented two phones. And they could tell from some electrical measurement if you had doctored your system (added an illegal phone).
For many years, the only phone at 1107 Hope Street lived on my grandfather’s desk, in a niche on the first floor just outside the kitchen. There wasn’t much in the way of privacy.
My dad: I would wander across the street to Springdale Methodist Church to telephone girls to ask them out on dates because I didn’t want anyone to hear!
My aunt: Your grandfather and father once had a lot of fun making noise while I was attempting to talk to a male caller. I don’t recall nagging to get another phone, but I probably should have, if only for the privacy reason.
My aunt on the phone, circa 1958.
Of course, what the kids saw as a lack of privacy, the adults saw as an opportunity. My grandparents used to time my aunt’s phone calls with a kitchen timer and bell, to keep her from tying up the line for too long. (My aunt says she would tiptoe into the kitchen and turn the timer back to buy more time on the phone.)
Finally, in the fall of 1963, my grandparents agreed to end the phone wars and have a second phone (not a second line; just a second phone) installed on the second floor, in the hallway between the bedrooms and bathroom.
It wasn’t a concession to the kids, but a way to make their own lives easier.
My dad: Think about it: they were getting older, and at that time there was no voice recording, so if you didn’t make it downstairs in time, you missed the call and spent the next 3 hours wondering who called! I think that’s all there was behind it.
My aunt: As your grandparents only splurged on items for practical reasons, I too believe the second phone was installed because your grandparents found it more difficult to sprint down the stairs to answer the phone.
I’ve used this pic before. Here’s my great-grandma using the upstairs phone on her 94th birthday in October 1980. The phone is almost certainly a Western Electric Model 500 — in black, as you can see.
I do not know whether my grandpa — a tinkerer and a curious sort — ever figured out how to dial one phone from the other, creating his own benign variation on the call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house scenario. It sounds like the kind of thing he would have taken advantage of to save himself a trip up or down the stairs.
I also do not know whether my grandfather ever owned an answering machine. I cannot for the life of me remember his ever having one.
(The one thing I do remember about my grandparents was that my grandma was deaf as a stone post, and her hearing aid used to whistle when she was on the phone, maybe ’cause she’d cranked it up high. I can still hear the sound.)
By the time my family left 1107 Hope, Ma Bell was no longer a monopoly, and the company’s hold on phone installation had been relaxed.
I don’t remember for sure, but I think my grandfolks’ subsequent home in the Rochester area might even have had *three* phones — one in the kitchen, one in the bedroom area and one in the basement.
I dunno if that’s true, though. Sounds awfully profligate for people who clung so strictly to a single phone for so many years.
Hope Street 
We did have a way to dial within the house. You dialed “1191” and hung up. The phones would ring a distinctively longer ring and when you both picked up you could talk; I think there was some time limit before the dial tone would kick in again. However to my knowledge this was never really adopted as an intercom system by the adults in the household.
This method, BTW, was a holdover from the legit method you used to call people on your party line years before.
I remember purchasing rather than renting my first phone. It was very exciting to buy a “designer” phone.
I see I used this date as another time to inscribe my infamous “WHOPEE.” These exclamations were only reserved for very exciting occasions! Also, I would like to point out that Grossee is sitting on the very hamper by the upstairs phone, onto which I would perch to talk, and inconveniently tipped over…Actually, it may well be the replacement hamper, after I tipped over and landed onto the original–which your father then turned into a woofer or a tweeter. I am wondering how that phone was not damaged because I think I pulled it onto the floor with me. A current cell phone would have cracked, unless it had an expensive case!